Dot Hill is showcasing its SANnet II storage solutions to the Australian market at Storage World Australia 2003, October 13-14, at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre. The SANnet II Fibre Channel and SANnet II Blade storage systems will be featured in Dot Hill’s stand.

HP achieved top high performance technical computing results on the SPEC OMP benchmark suite for compute-intensive processing.

Marking another milestone on its roadmap for AlphaServer customers, HP has begun shipment of its most powerful AlphaServer system yet, the 64-processor HP AlphaServer GS1280. The company also introduced a new entry-level system, the single-processor HP AlphaServer DS15.

The Belgium company Hemeris is delivering computing on the tap for universities and companies from their Brussel's location. Today, they have two 32 dual Athlon processor clusters online. The plan is to make available a 512 processor system in the near future. Alain Marsily, CEO of Hemeris, sees a growing market for this, even for university departments which traditionally are more interested in owning their own clusters. But, as these clusters are in general not very large, they are interested in running their simulations once and a while on a very large high performance computing system. Hemeris is also working with commercial companies, but details on that are not yet made public.

GridIron Software introduced version 1.2 of GridIron XLR8, a Grid application development tool and runtime software. GridIron XLR8 enables computationally intensive applications to run faster on multiple computers.

IBM and Cisco announced a set of open software technologies designed to increase the end-to-end intelligence and responsiveness of the global IT infrastructure as part of the development of "self-healing" computing systems and networks. The companies are working on a set of proposed technologies and standards creating a common language to detect, log and resolve system problems. BM has submitted a Common Base Event (CBE) format, which is envisioned as the basis for standardized exchange of problem determination data via web services, to the OASIS Standards Body.

Novartis has adopted an Intel Pentium 4 processor powered PC Grid platform as a strategic part of its 5-year plan for extending R&D capabilities. The PC refresh programme forms part of enhancements to the organisation's IT strategy. These enhancements include boosting computing power, strengthening R&D efficiencies and supporting efforts to bring novel medicines to patients faster. Novartis is also looking to apply the PC Grid infrastructure to mainstream business-computing challenges.

HP has launched a joint initiative with UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, to improve scientific research in southeastern Europe by providing Grid computing technology to four universities. The initiative, which will be implemented over a two-year period through HP's University Relations and Philanthropy and Education programmes, will help enable the universities to harness the power of Grid computing.

The pyGlobus version 1.0.2 has been released. There are two versions: one for the globus-2.2.x and for globus-2.4.x.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $9 million to support 20 projects as part of its ongoing NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI). The projects extend NMI's efforts to develop and distribute production-quality open-source and open-standards middleware and include awards that focus on experimental applications of new middleware capabilities.

SchlumbergerSema and Sun Microsystems have signed an agreement to bring utility computing solutions to customers in the energy, finance, telecommunications and public sectors around the world. The agreement enables SchlumbergerSema, a member of the Sun iForce community, to deploy Sun's utility computing architecture so that customers in these sectors can dynamically match IT sourcing to business needs. These customers can have a globally available, secure outsourced business solution that includes consulting and managed services as an option with SchlumbergerSema.